MDC's CIO Alf Wachsmann gets DDN Pioneer Award

Dr Alf Wachsmann, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) in the Helmholtz Association in Berlin, Germany, was awarded the "DDN Pioneer Award 2015". With this prize, the US-based company DDN distinguishes individuals, groups, or institutions "who are embracing leading-edge high performance computing technologies to shatter long-standing technical limits and to accelerate business results and scientific insights".

A DDN statement on the occasion of awarding the prize says: "As the CIO of Germany-based Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC), which investigates basic biological concepts to understand disease mechanisms and to close the gap between basic biomedical and clinical research, Dr Alf Wachsmann and his team were the first to test a SAP HANA cluster. Based on the requirements of life sciences researchers at the center, he and his team used their experience in integrating existing decentralized computing resources to form a federated in-memory database system. This approach combined advantages of cloud computing, such as efficient use of hardware resources and provisioning of managed software, with the security of storing and processing sensitive data on local hardware only."

Alf Wachsmann joined the MDC in Berlin as CIO in 2012. His career led him from the German Electron Synchrotron Lab (DESY) to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC; now SLAC National Accelerator Lab), and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST).

Provided by Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres